Desktop on the Linux... (and BSD, of course)

Time to take a look back and under the hood of the current state of FOSS based desktops: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly – Bloat, strange APIs, too much complexity.

The first decade of the 21st century brought huge progress in the development of FOSS Desktop systems. Users can now choose from a broad range of environments, which all adhere to a coherent set of standards. Not to forget that FOSS did even pioneer some GUI technologies which were later adopted by other (read: non free) systems.

There's one year left of this decade. Time to take a look back and under the hood of the current state of FOSS based desktops: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

FrozenCache

Mitigating cold-boot attacks for Full-Disk-Encryption software

Cold boot attacks are a major risk for the protection that Full-Disk-Encryption solutions provide. FrozenCache is a general-purpose solution to this attack for x86 based systems that employs a special CPU cache mode known as "Cache-as-RAM". Switching the CPU cache into a special mode forces data to held exclusively in the CPU cache and not to be written to the backing RAM locations